


We All Have Our Favorites

by scioscribe



Category: Only Ever Yours - Louise O'Neill
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, Friendship/Love, Gen, Medical Experimentation, Rebellion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-10 19:30:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8933989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: In which those Underground don't always lie quiet and still, and freida is able to give isabel a better ending.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [atreic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/atreic/gifts).



> Canon-typical content, including body image issues, medical experimentation, sexism/misogyny, and references to sexual abuse (including childhood sexual abuse).
> 
> Happy Yuletide! ...which seems weird after that disclaimer, but it's very sincerely meant.

“I am not immune to compassion,” he said. freida didn’t know his name. It didn’t seem to matter, since she no longer had one herself: from freida to chastity-felicity to #630 to #37, drawer number thirty-seven out of a possible fifty. What would happen if there were fifty-one troublemakers, fifty-one cast-off eves? Who would make room for the newcomer, #1 or someone else? She was allowed to ask him these kinds of questions—he encouraged questions as tests of her brain activity—but she didn’t. She wanted him to think she was further gone than she was.

She wanted him to stop waking her up.

The first time he had done it, she’d come back to herself in the middle of a seizure. He had stuck something between her teeth, something that tasted like chocco.

“I’ll need you alert from time to time,” he’d said.

freida said, “I thought I was dead.”

Did he smile then? The white mask was still covering his mouth. She had never seen his lips, and he had woken her up now at least a dozen times. But the corners of his eyes crinkled.

If he kept her alive long enough, would she age, even in her glass box? Would she look like a chastity? Or was she stopped, somehow? He had promised her _nothing_ and he had given her _never_ instead. That was what he told her, that first time: “In a way, you will never be dead.”

He’d gone on to explain that the research he conducted with her would live on in generations of eves, batch after batch after batch. She was saving others from genetic repetition of her imperfections. But just as importantly, he said—well, not just as importantly, but he supposed it would feel that way to _her_ —freida would have a long life in the Underground.

“You said it wouldn’t hurt.”

“What hurts? Does anything hurt? You shouldn’t be having a pain reaction.”

She was allowed to have pain reactions—brief ones—when he drew blood or tested her muscles with minor electroshock. She realized, in retrospect, that she had misunderstood what he had meant when he said he’d heard about isabel. He had meant: _your friend is dead, but you will not even really be hurt._

There was always another bottom to drop out of her hope for herself.

freida woke up again and again in the sterile whiteness of the Underground. He drew her spinal fluid with an enormous needle. He tested the resiliency of her skin. He gave her pelvic and breast exams. He applied chemicals to her body and her hair. Some of these procedures, the ones more likely to cause what he called pain reactions, he performed while she was unconscious.

He said, “I am not immune to compassion,” when she woke and found shiny silver burn-marks on her arms and legs. “You didn’t have to be awake for that. They shouldn’t hurt now. I applied salve.”

He didn’t ask freida if they hurt despite that.

She had promised herself she wouldn’t ask any questions, would not say one single unnecessary thing—sometimes she thought she would stop saying even the necessary things, but she was too exhausted to be any trouble. chastity-ruth had said freida’s slavering agreeability and hunger for approval was the most essential part of her, and chastity-ruth would have known. chastity-ruth had known her better than anyone. In the end, freida couldn’t even keep the promise to herself that she would say as little as possible, because after he told her about the salve, she said, “Why even bother? What difference does it make?”

“I don’t expect you to understand it, but a man in my situation has certain ethical obligations. We take an oath. ‘First, do no unnecessary or unwarranted harm.’” Creases again appeared around his eyes, like he was laughing at some private joke. “Anyway, #37, we all have our favorites, and for the time being, at least, you’re mine. This place serves as the period to so many sentences—you probably don’t even know what that means, do you? It doesn’t matter. Anyway, you came with quite a tale. On a scientific level, it’s very interesting, trying to make sure your considerable problems don’t get replicated in future batches of eves. Engineers love problems.”

 _I’m a problem_ , freida thought.

Maybe that was why isabel had loved her.

“Anyway,” he said briskly, “I have quite a busy day ahead of me, so let’s get started, shall we? Minus all the theatrics and doom-and-gloom, because it’s still better than the pyre, isn’t it?” He didn’t wait for an answer.

He fitted the skull-cap with its wires and flashing lights over her head and tightened it.

“I’m going to induce dreaming for a few hours,” he said. “REM-sleep. When you wake up, I’ll need you to be absolutely honest about the content of your dreams, so I’ll give you an injection of sodium-pentothal. It will conflict a little with the drug you’re on while you’re in the box, so I’ll have to leave you out tonight. There’s a resource room for this kind of occasion that you can use if you’re cooperative, but I’ll warn you right now, if you kick up any kind of fuss, I’ll box you without putting you under, and that won’t be pleasant for you.”

freida let her chin fall forwards a little in what he took for a nod.

“Good. Please lie back now.”

She lay down. Her body didn’t know what she wanted—her body wanted whatever pleasantness he thought her life Underground consisted of—because she found herself wriggling just a little to find some more comfortable position against the cold metal table. Her legs were asleep; her hips felt misaligned somehow, at the wrong angle from her back. She twisted a little—he frowned but said nothing—and turned her head to the side. The net of wires shifted. Almost like hair, except she had no hair anymore. He had shaved her head almost immediately.

He gave her a quick, matter-of-fact injection in the neck. She winced—an acceptable pain reaction—and when she opened her eyes again, she realized what she was looking at.

One of the boxes. Box #36.

And inside it: isabel.

The drug washed freida away, not caring what she saw or didn’t see. She filled her dreams with endless isabels, isabel mirrored in every bud of every flower, isabel at six and ten and sixteen, isabel strangled with snakeskin, isabel fat, isabel thin, isabel hanging from a door, isabel in a box. And there was no Father to come between them, even between freida and her dead isabel, because the Father was alive and they were dead, they were dead and buried Underground, they were the period at the end of the sentence. She played a game of MyFace on her ePad and her face was juxtaposed with isabel’s and each time, without any pause, without any regret, she chose isabel. isabel, isabel, isabel.

“I would say this is excessive, #630, but you’ve always been excessive.” chastity-ruth, only younger, younger than freida had ever seen her. “Fatgirl buffet and then the vomitorium and then k-cal blockers and then mashed potatoes with extra butter and heaps of pasta, as if you didn’t know how nutrition worked, as if you didn’t know how your own _life_ worked. And now: betrayal, betrayal, neglect, and suddenly, adoration. Suddenly, obsession.”

“I’m not #630 anymore,” freida said. “I’m #37.”

“You don’t think I know what you still call yourself? You don’t think he knows? You’ll have to tell him all of this when you wake up.”

“I can’t wake up. I’m dead.”

“I’m not fortunate enough for you to be dead. That,” chastity-ruth said, “is why I gave you that name. As a very, very bitter joke, though you’re too stupid to realize it. Darwin never read you those books.”

“You can’t know about that.”

“I know everything about you.”

And freida thought, _No. You don’t know about isabel. You don’t know she’s dead the way I am. You don’t know I love her._ The two things seemed somehow of equal importance, as if she had somehow loved the bruises off isabel’s throat and the Father out of her bed. She was dead now, and that meant she no longer had to be afraid, being afraid was a pain reaction. There was nothing left for her to lose. She and isabel were dead together.

But chastity-ruth was smiling a terrible smile—it was worse because of the pink lipgloss on her young mouth. She looked like megan, but she was not megan, her cruelty didn't even have the excuse of ambition. “I know everything about you,” she said again. “The lucky, lucky #630. I chose the name you were given as a chastity. There is a preapproved list, of course, but it’s the same preapproved list used for all the eves. Some of us are given to terrible exercises of humor. agyness. As though there could ever be a concubine with that name. megan, isabel, cara. Those are the names we give to those we wish to succeed. freida—well, it’s neutral enough. You might have had a chance at least to spread your legs time and time again, if you hadn’t squandered it. Even Darwin Goldsmith might have visited you, which would have made the highlight of your life the same as it was in _this_ life.”

Something burned between freida’s legs. _They stitched them up_ , Darwin had said. _That’s the punishment for adultery_.

But she hadn’t committed adultery. She could have married Darwin—she could never have married Darwin—but she had not been married to anyone else when they had had their Heavenly Seventy.

chastity-ruth sighed. “chastity-felicity. I called you chastity-felicity, if you can stop your mind from wandering.”

“I’m dreaming. He gave me something to make me dream.”

“You’re not dreaming. You’re dead.”

“Yes,” freida said. She touched her head; her hair had grown back. “I’m dead.”

“felicity,” chastity-ruth said, “means ‘luck.’ At least according to the list we’re given. It was my name, once. I was your namesake. I was meant to have luck, and then I had none, and you had all the luck there was, to have isabel’s love, and you didn’t deserve any of it, and at last the universe seemed to recognize that. I was so happy, to see you lose everything. I felt lucky at last. This, I said, is a true marker of felicity.”

She woke up to the cold table. She had turned in her sleep, and he had let her: she had turned toward isabel, the way the Nature Channel said certain flowers turned toward the sun. isabel’s head had been shaved, like hers, and her hands were folded demurely across her belly, which was slightly concave, hollowed-in. Her bones all seemed plainly visible. He had told freida before that he sometimes tested obesity and sometimes starvation, trying to see the upper and lower weight limits the eves’ physical structures would allow. freida had, without meaning to, almost begged him to not make her gain weight—she couldn’t stand the thought of waking up fatter and fatter until she would feel the glass of the box pressing on her from all sides. He had laughed.

“I’ve ruined higher ratings than yours, #37. But I think that stage of my experimentation is over. Starvation is more what we’re interested in—your chastities can intervene in cases of weight gain well before the ballooning stages we’ve reached down here. But it would be advantageous to be able to design eves with perfect weight control.”

Was that what he was testing on isabel? With her shrunken stomach? Was that why he had had her brought down?

But she understood—almost _remembered_ , the way she knew she had remembered, somehow, the meaning of her shortest-lived name—that he had not had isabel brought down at all.

chastity-ruth had done it. They all had their favorites, and isabel had been hers. isabel had been everyone’s, until freida had gone Underground, until her problems had been interesting. So interesting that she was allowed to stay awake overnight. Just this one night.

freida thought, _Let me have felicity._

“Are you fully awake now?”

“I’m awake.”

“This may sting a bit.” He gave her another injection. The sodium-pentothal. “Now. What did you dream? Try to be as complete as you can.”

freida told him, but all the while, she thought about buttonholes: no one would say something with buttons had holes in it but of course there were holes, there were intentional holes. She built buttonholes into her dream and had to hope he wouldn’t notice the gaps where there was no story, no answer, no truth even with the truth serum. She said, “I dreamed about other eves, and the mirrors in the flowers—I dreamed about one of my old chastities, the one who hated me, but she was young.” megan had always been scornful of anyone discussing their dreams and freida found herself drawing on every old habit megan had mocked. The rambling tone, the stressing of the difference between what something actually was versus what she knew it was, the fanatical interest in every last little detail.

freida didn’t know men, but freida knew megan, and she knew megan knew men, and megan had known this: his eyes started to droop at the corners.

“That’s quite a bit of brain activity,” he said, rubbing his temples. “None of it _useful_ or anything other than _silly_ —vacuous nonsense—but it’s still evidence that nothing I’ve done has eroded your functionality. And none of it seems to be too abnormal.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry you’re not more abnormal? _That’s_ abnormal, I suppose.”

“I want to be helpful.”

“Do you? Then dreaming agrees with you, #37. I’d say I’d induce it more often, but there’s really no point, once it’s been established.” He took off his gloves and let them snap loudly against his wrist and then, after a moment, hooked the white mask off his ears as well: for the first time, freida saw his mouth. So he was a person after all. Good for him.

“Our work together may get harder,” he said.

freida almost wanted to laugh, but instead she controlled herself—the one thing, as chastity-ruth said, that she had gotten right in the end. “I’m not afraid.”

“Stupid girl.” He shook his head. “It’s late, and I’m going home. The resource room has a cot and a toilet. All the drawers are locked to my handprint, so don’t try to summon your meager abilities to try to steal a scalpel or a syringe or whatever you fantasize about when you tell yourself I can’t know what’s going on behind your eyes. Ah—there’s the #37 I know. There’s the troublemaker.” He chucked her under the chin, like she was a toddler. “I prefer you angry to sad—you’re more responsive.”

freida just closed her eyes and counted backwards until she heard him laugh a little and then leave. The door hissed shut behind him and locked.

She kept on counting. Backwards from one hundred. Backwards from one thousand. Then she sat up, alone and not alone in the waiting stillness Underground, surrounded by fallen eves. One of many. The kind of quiet there, with only her breath and the humming machinery, with only the soft slosh of the fluid in the boxes against the glass walls and the skin of her sisters, that was, she thought, what it must have been like before they were hatched. When they knew nothing. Maybe that was the last time she had been loyal to isabel—not even when they were children, not even in the memories she had tried to keep. In this strangely full silence.

“One more time,” she said. “One thing. Just one thing.”

She went to isabel’s drawer and opened it—there was a moment of shock, like her mind almost slipping on itself, when it actually glided smoothly out as she tugged it open. (Was that the one hope she wasn’t going to lose?) But why would he have locked the boxes, really? What reason would he have had to think that she would care about anyone else? Nothing she had done had ever suggested that. They weren’t made to have loyalties. _Favorites_. They weren’t made to have favorites, but she had been isabel’s anyway.

If she needed to give isabel an injection to wake her, there was nothing left. Even if he hadn’t locked up _those_ , she wouldn’t have known what to use. _Stupid girl_.

She touched isabel’s cheek. The liquid around her was yellow and just slightly sticky—different from the clear liquid freida sometimes found on her own skin when he woke her up—but isabel’s face was warm. Her cheekbone felt sharp, almost like it would cut freida’s hand. There were no bruises on her neck, as if even dead, or close to it, isabel was not allowed to be anything other than beautiful. Or freida had come at last to never seeing her as anything else.

Still, she believed chastity-ruth about what isabel had done, even if chastity-ruth had lied about it killing her. It had damaged her, made her unsuitable somehow for the Father.

There was a chance isabel couldn’t wake up even with an injection.

There was a chance that if she did wake up, she would die in such a way that even being buried Underground wouldn’t keep her as this half-alive ghost.

What she had to believe—had to have the necessary megan-like arrogance to believe, maybe—was that she knew isabel well enough to know that isabel would want to wake up from this, even if it killed her. She had to believe that despite everything, isabel would want to see her again.

Her hands were shaking when she disconnected the IV tubing from isabel’s arm.

She waited.

 _This is a pain reaction_ , she thought.

She waited and she was crying, she had lost whatever respect chastity-ruth had had for her at the end, she was crying not as she cried sometimes now because he had done something to her tear ducts, in a kind of drippy and aimless way, but almost sobbing—it felt like it was taking her whole body and all her strength just to keep breathing.

Then—

“freida?”

freida could barely see isabel through the blur in her eyes. “I dreamed about you,” she said, but she didn’t know if isabel could even understand her. “I dreamed about you. She was wrong. You were my felicity.”

isabel held on to the side of the box and freida came around to her and kissed her fingers, one by one by one, tasting the medicinal sting of the yellow gel. For a moment, isabel’s hands were just like sticks, but then she was holding freida so hard it hurt. “You found me,” she kept saying over and over again. “freida, you found me. I knew you’d find me.” Even though that had to be a lie, freida thought. It couldn’t be true that isabel had believed in her at all. Could it? “I knew you would take me away.”

freida stroked her bare scalp, her palm tingling. It might have been aberrant. She barely knew anymore, but all she wanted—all she felt like she was capable of wanting ever again—was to crawl inside the box with isabel and hold her, the way isabel had held her the last time things had really been good between them. So she did. She slipped and almost fell and isabel giggled—actually giggled, like they were sitting around eating chocco, like they were eleven again, or even younger than that—and put her arms around her. She was all bones.

They lay like that for what freida thought might have been anywhere between ten minutes and an hour, and then isabel said, “I tried to kill myself, didn’t I?”

freida nodded, her head moving against isabel’s collarbone. “That’s what chastity-ruth told me. She said—you tried to hang yourself. She said you _did_ hang yourself, that you were dead.”

“I thought I _was_ ,” isabel said.

“Yes,” freida said, feeling almost alive herself. “There's a lot of that going around.”

isabel laughed again. “Then—I remember chastity-ruth talking to the Father. She said the School could always find something to do with defectives, that there was always room Underground. He—He wanted me thrown on the pyre. But she convinced Him not to do it. She said—she said that if He did that, I would keep happening. There will always be another isabel, she said.”

“There will never be another isabel,” freida said.

“No,” isabel said. “I doubt they’ll even use the name ever again.” She turned over onto her side and freida turned, too, but stayed facing her, so that they were forehead-to-forehead. isabel’s eyes were too wide in her sunken, skeletal face. freida wanted to kiss her eyelids, so she did, and isabel let her. isabel said, “We’re Underground, aren’t we?”

“No. We’re bald and you’re starving and we’re lying in medical goo out somewhere in the America-Zone.”

“Oh, somebody’s funny now.”

“‘Humor is poor compensation for aesthetic failure,’” freida said. They had memorized that once. They had repeated it back to the chastities on command. There was no urge in her to make conversation in any way that would fill the little silences between them; everything, even the trivial things, the jokes she felt like she could think of again, isabel’s breath on her skin, seemed to matter more than any news, any questions. isabel, she knew, didn’t really care what was being done to them. She didn’t care about the examinations and the bloodletting and search for their abnormalities.

freida didn’t know what they cared about, not now, but she knew there were no answers.

She put her knees on top of isabel’s. “Tonight is special.”

“Fatgirl buffet-only night.”

“No, it’s the only—”

“Fatgirl buffet-only night,” isabel said again. “The one night when you can get everything you want. No-consequence holiday.”

freida swallowed. isabel kissed her on the forehead.

“Right,” freida said. Her voice felt rusty. “No-consequence holiday night. And you need to go to the buffet at least twice so I won’t have your bony knees poking me. You can’t settle on a target weight.”

“If it isn’t one thing,” isabel said, “it’s another. Isn’t it?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t have any words for it. And I don’t want to talk about it now.” There was, suddenly, a kind of brittle snappishness in her voice, and freida thought for a second that the worst thing would happen and isabel would close her eyes and say that she was tired. That, being awake, all she wanted was to go back to sleep. But she only dug her knees into freida’s.

“Ow!”

“I lied. There are still consequences.”

“Traitorous bitch.”

“Gullible fool.” isabel kissed her again. “Did you really tell Darwin you loved him?”

She had tried to forget that. “Yes. But I didn’t.” She had only ever loved one person. She thought, _I have no generosity. I didn’t even have enough to give you. I didn’t even love you enough to give you the right words to tell me anything._ She said, more intensely, “I never loved him at all.”

“I believe you,” isabel said, very softly. Then, “Weirdo.”

When isabel could stand—there was no way for her to do it without leaning on freida, but in the end, around three o’clock in the morning, she could do it at least a little—they climbed out of the box and walked like children in a three-legged race over to the resource room. The cot looked sterile and uninviting—the gel in the box at least had stayed warm—so they didn’t lie down on it, even though the trip across the length of the room had made isabel start to cough again. Instead, they walked back out to the lab. They took markers—not thick styluses, but old ink-sodden ones—and drew flowers and smiling eves on the glass of the other boxes. freida drew the man in the surgical mask and gave the mask crocodile teeth. The burns on her legs had started to ache again, no matter what he had said about the salve, and when she told isabel about them, isabel demanded a look and then pronounced them barbaric. freida couldn’t stop laughing at that.

“I know contextually it seems like it doesn’t matter,” isabel said, “but it’s still true.”

“What else would I be good for, now?”

“Being my friend,” isabel said quietly. “Like always.”

It passed into four in the morning. isabel sat on the floor, too weak to stand, and freida found a discarded ePad with a cracked screen and some preloaded videos. They watched old Nature Channel specials on giraffes and penguins. isabel kept touching the screen, like she was too young to know it was only glass and the animals weren’t right there. Her blinking had gotten irregular; her eyes closed for longer and longer. Her left eyelid was jumpy.

At five in the morning, they found a half-eaten bag of stale potato chips in a desk drawer. They licked grease and salt off their fingers. isabel turned the bag inside-out after it was done and breathed in the tiniest of the crumbs stuck to the bottom. freida couldn’t watch her doing it.

“We said no consequences!” isabel said. “Anyway, he has you at a normal weight.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to _look_.”

At six in the morning, they climbed back into isabel’s box. isabel’s breath had turned shallow and freida couldn’t stop crying—the leaking had turned so steady and continuous that she didn’t really know whether she was sad or happy or whether it was just his handiwork again. She didn’t want to cry. She wanted to see isabel clearly.

“Do you remember,” isabel whispered, “when you pretended to be a monkey?”

“When have you ever let me forget it?”

“That’s how I want to remember you. If I can remember things. How do you want to remember me?”

freida tried to think, but she was so tired. There was no time in isabel’s life before the Father had had a hand out for her. There had never been a time when isabel had been safe. But freida could be selfish—they were her own memories, and she hadn’t known anything, had missed everything for so many years. She could remember isabel drawing a heart on the cast on her broken leg and urging everyone else to do the same: how furious chastity-ruth had been until she had learned it was isabel’s idea. She could remember isabel sneaking into her room at night. The times when she had snored. She could remember isabel in a pink party dress for her Foto, unable to stop laughing at a joke freida had told her, spoiling the picture again and again. She could remember isabel tonight.

She said, “I want to remember all of you,” but isabel was gone.

freida said, “I want to remember that you used to always smell like lavender,” and she put her hands on the harsh edges of isabel’s bare shoulderblades and held her like that until she stopped crying. It was like some immense dam had been built up inside of her.   It wasn’t another bottom dropping out.

She felt some kind of beauty unfolding inside her.

She had been with isabel. They had been happy.

“I love you,” she said. “I love you. I’m sorry I was really shitty at it, but I love you. Remember that, if you can remember anything. Monkey-girl loves you.”

She kissed isabel just once more, very gently, next to what would have once been her hairline, and then she climbed out of the box. She didn’t know his schedule, but she couldn’t imagine it would be much longer before he arrived. He seemed so organized, with his syringes and scalpels locked away. As if he would account for everything. A place for everygirl and everygirl in her place.

But she was his favorite, and so he had let her stay _out_ of place, just for one night. His little problem-girl.

Humming a little to herself, freida walked up and down the row of boxes, #1-#35. With all she and isabel had drawn on them, it was almost like walking through a garden. It seemed unfair not to acknowledge the similarity by opening all the gates. Thirty-five maids, all in a row. mary, mary, quite contrary, how does your gene pool grow? With silver bells, and cockle shells, and pretty eves all in a row.

Slowly, one by one, they began to sit up, like flowers coming into bloom.

freida said, “Hello.”

freida said, “You’re all very beautiful.”

freida said, “This is a day where you can do whatever you want.”

When the door slid open a little later, they all seemed to know exactly what it was they wanted to do.


End file.
